Women’s Movements in India: From Freedom Struggle to Dalit Feminism

When we talk about India’s women’s movements, it’s tempting to picture a single, continuous march from oppression to equality. The real story is messier and far more interesting. It runs through revolutionary Bengal, drought-hit villages in Maharashtra, iron-ore mines in Chhattisgarh, and Himalayan forests, and it keeps rewriting its own definition of who counts as a “woman’s issue.” Here’s how that story unfolded, decade by decade.

Women who shaped the freedom struggle on their own terms 🔗

Indian women didn’t just support the nationalist movement, they built parts of it. Educated, upper-caste women often worked alongside Gandhi within Congress-led politics, while working-class and peasant women fought battles of their own, against landlords, colonial taxes, and everyday survival, that rarely made it into textbooks. Both strands mattered, and both fed into the language of rights that later movements would use.

The revolutionary women of Bengal 🔗

Bengal’s armed underground produced some of the era’s most striking women. Kalpana Dutta trained with Surya Sen’s group and took part in the 1930 Chittagong Armoury Raid, for which she was sentenced to transportation for life before her eventual release; she went on to join the Communist Party of India and remained involved in relief and political work after independence. Two years later, in February 1932, a young Bina Das walked into her own convocation ceremony at Calcutta University and fired five shots at the British Governor of Bengal. She missed, was arrested on the spot, and served nine years in prison before rejoining the Congress movement. Their contemporary Pritilata Waddedar led an armed raid on a Chittagong club in 1932 and died by suicide rather than be captured. Together, these women unsettled the colonial assumption that political violence was a man’s domain.

Sarojini Naidu’s long institutional legacy 🔗

Sarojini Naidu took a different, equally significant path. In 1925 she became the first Indian woman to preside over the Indian National Congress, and after independence she was appointed Governor of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), making her the first woman to hold that office in the country. Alongside her political career, she co-founded the Women’s Indian Association in 1917 to campaign for suffrage and legal reform, and later presided over the All India Women’s Conference. Naidu’s career shows how the freedom movement doubled as a training ground for India’s earliest women’s rights institutions.

Kisan sabhas and the shift toward inclusive politics 🔗

The years around independence saw women pulled into a different kind of struggle: agrarian revolt. In Bengal, the 1946-47 Tebhaga movement mobilised sharecroppers demanding two-thirds, instead of half, of their harvest, and women were central to guarding crops and confronting police. Further south, the Telangana Peoples’ Struggle of 1946-51 saw Dalit-Bahujan and lower-caste women take up arms against feudal landlords and, later, the Indian state itself, making it one of the earliest instances of women engaging in explicitly caste-conscious, anti-feudal politics rather than nationalist politics alone. Bihar’s kisan sabhas saw similar patterns of women organising against exploitative tenancy.

Once independence arrived, the energy behind these peasant struggles didn’t disappear, it changed shape. Activists and organisers began asking how a newly independent society should be reorganised, not just along nationalist lines but along the intersecting lines of gender, caste, and class. By the 1960s, a growing number of middle-class women had entered formal politics, gradually building the vocabulary and networks that the next decade’s feminist movements would draw on.

The 1970s: an Indian feminism finds its own voice 🔗

Around 1970, something distinct emerged. Indian feminism began engaging with patriarchy and male domination in ways that echoed Western feminist thought, but it refused to stop there, it also pulled in caste, class, and ecology as inseparable parts of women’s oppression in India.

The Shahada movement 🔗

In January 1972, in the Bhil Adivasi belt of Dhulia district in Maharashtra, a peasant mobilisation called the Shahada movement, organised through the Shramik Sangathan, began as a fight against exploitative landlords. Within a couple of years its women members had pushed it further: they marched into liquor dens, smashed alcohol containers, and confronted wife-beaters directly, turning what had been treated as a private, family matter into a public political issue. It’s widely regarded as one of independent India’s earliest explicitly anti-patriarchal mobilisations.

The Chipko movement 🔗

In the Himalayan foothills of what is now Uttarakhand, women took a very different kind of stand. In March 1974, when loggers arrived at Reni village to fell over two thousand trees, Gaura Devi led local women to physically place themselves between the trees and the axes, forcing the loggers to withdraw. The Chipko movement spread through the region in the years that followed, tying women’s daily labour of collecting fuel and fodder directly to forest conservation, and it eventually influenced national forest policy.

Militant trade unions widen the definition of women’s rights 🔗

By the late 1970s, women’s rights struggles had moved into industrial labour too. The Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangh, formed in 1977 under Shankar Guha Niyogi to represent contract miners in the Dalli-Rajhara belt, became known for its uncompromising style of unionism, and for treating women’s issues as core to its labour politics rather than an afterthought. The union’s women’s wing, the Mahila Mukti Morcha, pushed for equal wages for women doing the same manual mining work as men, and ran its own campaigns against alcoholism and domestic violence within worker families, sometimes putting offending husbands on trial before an assembly of their peers. This union’s approach, treating gender and class oppression as bound together rather than separate battles, expanded women’s movements well beyond the concerns of educated, middle-class activists and into the everyday lives of manual and informal-sector workers.

Dalit women’s movement and the turn to intersectionality 🔗

Through the 1980s, a hard question kept surfacing within the broader women’s movement: whose experience was actually being centred? Dalit women, facing discrimination as both Dalits and women, increasingly argued that mainstream feminism, largely shaped by upper-caste women, wasn’t built to see their specific realities. This led to the emergence of independent Dalit women’s organisations in the 1990s, most notably the National Federation of Dalit Women, founded in 1995 by Ruth Manorama, followed later by the All India Dalit Women’s Forum. Both organisations argued that Dalit women needed their own platforms rather than being folded into either the Dalit movement, still largely led by men, or the women’s movement, still largely led by upper-caste women.

This organising also reached an international stage. In October 1998, Dalit activists from India and the wider diaspora gathered for the first World Dalit Convention in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, drawing global attention to caste-based discrimination and, within it, the particular vulnerabilities faced by Dalit women. The convention marked one of the earliest attempts to frame caste discrimination as an issue for international human rights bodies, not just a domestic Indian matter.

Where the movement stands today 🔗

Trace the line from Bina Das’s prison cell to Gaura Devi’s forest to the Mahila Mukti Morcha’s union hall to the National Federation of Dalit Women’s founding meeting, and a pattern becomes clear. Indian women’s movements didn’t evolve in a straight line from “freedom struggle” to “feminism.” They kept expanding what counted as a women’s issue, adding land rights, alcohol and domestic violence, forest ecology, fair wages, and caste discrimination to the list, often because women who were living those problems forced the movement to notice them. Contemporary feminist organising in India continues that same work, insisting that gender, caste, class, and religion overlap in ways that no single-issue movement can fully address. The legal reforms, protective laws, and shifts in public attitudes achieved over the past century are the direct result of this layered, often uncomfortable, expansion of who gets heard.

What do you think? Does thinking about India’s women’s movements as a series of expansions, rather than one unified struggle, change how you’d read a current debate on gender in India? And which of these movements, the revolutionary, the peasant, the ecological, or the Dalit-led, do you think gets the least attention today relative to its impact?

References

1. https://www.gktoday.in/kalpana-dutt/
2. https://www.livehistoryindia.com/story/herstory/bina-das
3. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sarojini-Naidu
4. https://feminisminindia.com/2020/08/12/women-armed-revolution-telangana-peoples-struggle/
5. https://www.isca.in/IJSS/Archive/v3/i5/10.ISCA-IRJSS-2014-66.pdf
6. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chipko-movement
7. https://sk.sagepub.com/book/mono/mapping-dalit-feminism/chpt/1-theorizing-intersectional-standpoint
8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262123447_Dalit_Movement_and_Dalit_International_Conferences